


Sum

by Cyndi



Category: The Good Doctor (TV 2017)
Genre: Angst, Autism, Autism Acceptance, Bullying, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Emotional/Psychological Abuse, Empathy, Flashbacks, Fluff, Friendship, Gaslighting, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, It's Shaire if you squint!, Kindness, Past Abuse, Verbal Abuse, autistic fanfic author, emotional connections, meltdowns, self-injurious behavior
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-13
Updated: 2019-03-13
Packaged: 2019-11-17 13:23:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,471
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18099356
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Cyndi/pseuds/Cyndi
Summary: Shaun has a violent self-injurious meltdown after leaving Doctor Han's office. Claire sees the whole thing. (Missing scenes filler for Breakdown.)





	Sum

**Author's Note:**

> Experiencing a meltdown is so much different than watching somebody have one. I feel like we didn't see the full eruption at the end of Breakdown, so I filled in the blanks.
> 
> Side note: Please don't tell me "you should use person with autism!" Shaun uses person first language because the writers of the show want him to. I'm autistic and many autistic people prefer identity first language. Please respect that. Thank you.
> 
> **(( CW: Swearing, flashbacks of past abuse, brief mention of ABA, use of the R-slur and meltdown related self-injurious behavior (SIB). ))**

.o

.o

 **Sum**  

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.o

I AM, the two most powerful words Doctor Shaun Murphy knew. What came after defined his identity.

He was a surgeon.

Not a pathologist.

Not immature.

Not a bully.

Not childish.

A man.

An autistic adult.

An abuse survivor.

A brother.

A doctor.

 _A surgeon_.

"I am a surgeon!" Shaun sobbed, every atom of his being vibrating. Language began to slip away from him. There was only the assertion, a truth that stayed true as long as he repeated it. "I _am_ a _surgeon!_ "

He slapped both hands repeatedly atop Doctor Han's wooden desk. The booming impacts traveled up his arms like shockwaves.

"I! Am! A! Surgeon! I am a surgeon! A surgeon, Doctor Han! A _surgeon!_ "

His behavior was out of line and he knew it, yet he couldn’t stop once he started. Control flitted beyond his grasp. Amidst the banging, Doctor Han picked up his phone, spoke indistinctly into it and set it down again, his face a smug mask.

Scalding sorrow clamped Shaun's throat shut because knew what the phone call meant. He hung his head and sniffled, his tear-streaked face contorted.

"I...am...a... _surgeon_."

"You _were_ ," Doctor Han's smooth voice answered him. "Now, you're fired.” He squeaked his chair, its protest louder than ambulance sirens. “I'm sorry, Shaun. Don't make this harder on yourself than it has to be."

The unfairness of it churned Shaun's stomach. With it came an intense desire to pound on Doctor Han's face, an impulse he resisted with the last willpower left to him. He wrenched his quivering self backwards away from the desk, nearly tripping over the chair behind him.

They wouldn't be having this conversation if Doctor Han hadn't barged in on one of his surgeries with his music, butted into how he talked to patients and pushed him into pathology. He was a chess pawn being maneuvered out of people's way without any consideration to his emotions, wants or needs.

 _People don't respect me because they don't see me as an equal. They care when they need something from me, not because I'm me,_ Shaun thought bitterly. He clenched his fists and forced his breath through a throat that refused to relax.

Steve didn't see him as a pawn. Steve was his shield.

But Steve died.

Dead people couldn't be disappointed. Shaun found a scintilla of comfort in that.

Two uniformed security guards arrived. One was a tall, graying black man who wore his hair in cornrows. Stubble dusted his chin like a starry celestial vista. The shorter man had a bald head and ruddy eyebrows. Freckles dotted his skin, myriads of tan islands on pale seas.

"Miller, Dougan." Doctor Han gave a nonverbal cue-- Shaun registered the flicker of movement in the corner of his right eye.

"C'mon." Miller, the taller guard, gestured to the door. His bass voice rumbled pleasantly.

Beside him, Dougan placed his hands on his hips and looked on expectantly. Neither wore hard faces like Doctor Han.

"We're taking you to your locker. Can we do this without a fight?" Dougan's thick northern Irish accent muddled his words in Shaun's ears.

Shaun took a moment to process Dougan's statement and slowly nodded his head. Defeat tasted bitterer than salty tears. He forced his crying down into a black hole because he no longer had a choice to not comply. Story of his life-- everybody else had the freedom to be who they were, but he did not.

His face burned and his raw throat ached as the uniformed security guards escorted him out of Doctor Han's office. Fresh tears blurred his vision. Everything came to him in vague, colorful shapes.

_"I'm sick of listening to you whine about a little teasing. It's all you do these days, whine. What did you do to make these kids start teasing you, huh? Huh? It's gotta be something you did."_

"No!" Shaun shouted at the memory of his dad whispering in his ear.

Curious people poked their heads out of their office doors. He pressed a hand against his brow and tousled his hair to block them from seeing his shame. Neurotypicals' respect for him always ended where his ‘difficult’ autistic traits began. In place of respect, he got patronized, ostracized and pitied. Disgusting.

"No!" He turned and hollered at Doctor Han's office. Words kept surging off his strained vocal cords. "I am a _surgeon!_ "

His voice buzzed against his bones and reverberated through the unforgiving white corridor. "A _surgeon!_ You are supposed to make me a surgeon!"

Doctor Han stood at the doorway of his office with his arms crossed and his face an impenetrable, unreadable mask. His dark eyes repelled Shaun's gaze like a magnet of the same polarity.

Why did neurotypical people's emotions get taken more seriously? Shaun tensed his jaw. Why were neurotypicals allowed the privilege of showing how they felt? Why did they, in the same moment they felt strongly, call his emotional responses _inappropriate, irrational_ and _immature_? Was it because of his autism? Was it because his ways of showing how he felt didn't match theirs? Did they recognize the effort he put into containing his emotions for _their_ comfort?

"My feelings are real, too!" He hissed at no one in particular. "My feelings hurt. My feelings _hurt_."

"Shaun," Miller spoke quietly.

Dougan reached out. "D'ya need help, buddy?"

 _Buddy_ was degrading. Not intentionally so, but it stung. Shaun scowled at the floor. Dougan's hand, usually friendly like his jolly tenor voice, became as threatening as a grease fire.

"No." Shaun flinched, avoiding being touched. He realized he stopped dead in the hall and forced his legs back into motion.

Both security officers flanked him. Too close for comfort-- he couldn't extend his elbows without brushing their arms.

Shaun walked, more because the people next to him were than out of the will to do it himself. Every footstep was an earthquake shaking his sense of self, every overhead light was a welder's arc torch blasting his optic nerves, and every breath was a tornado roaring into his lungs. The pressure of everything pushed his skin tighter against his muscles and the contracting knot in his stomach suffused fire throughout his nervous system. Outward pressure struggled against the inward collapse.

One good thing: Crying blocked his nose. There were no smells to latch onto as unwanted reminders of this moment.

"Okay, Shaun," Miller stopped outside the locker room. He ran a hand over his cornrow braids. "In you go. Empty your locker."

They called him Shaun because he wasn’t _Doctor Murphy_ to them anymore.

Shaun clasped his hands against his stomach and watched both guards with his peripheral vision. He did that a lot; people rarely realized how much he used the edges of his visual field to study the world around him in tolerable piecemeal bits. Central vision was overwhelming, sometimes his eyes took thousands of pictures a second if he focused them too for long, so he reserved his central vision for tasks requiring deep concentration or zeroing in on something in minute detail. Like surgery, the surgery Doctor Han refused to let him perform.

"W-What happens if I don't?" He inquired.

Dougan replied, "It gets tossed."

Tossed meant many things. In the air? Out a window? On the floor? In the trash?

Shaun tightened his lips. He needed to verify that his thoughts matched theirs.

"Tossed...where?"

Both guards exchanged frowns. The kind of frowns people shared when they questioned his intelligence like he wasn’t there. It was unintentionally insulting, but he learned to let it roll off like water. Neurotypicals were _weird_.

Dougan sighed. "In the trash."

Miller pushed the door open. Its old joints were a death knell.

Shaun remembered his dad throwing his toys away if they annoyed him. Personal belongings were liabilities, so he never kept more than he could pack into his pockets, a suitcase, a pillowcase or a backpack. Everything else was replaceable and held no sentimental value.

"You don't have to stay." He tightened his hands around his self-control and stared straight ahead. "I'll leave after I get my things. I won't do anything bad."

Whether they stayed or left no longer mattered to him when he entered the dimmer locker room. He moved like a robot towards his locker, every breath heavy as he changed out of his scrubs. All evidence of being a surgeon disappeared once he buttoned his street shirt and tied his tennis shoes.

He took the soft white towel out from under his backpack and pressed his face against it. His nose was clearer. The towel reeked of old sweat and needed laundering. At least it smelled bad. A bad smell to go with bad feelings.

Shaun's eyes refused to focus. He folded the towel and grasped the top of his backpack. One of its straps caught on the locker's latching mechanism.

But it wasn’t a locker anymore. It became a man's hands tugging at a blue pillowcase.

_"You stupid little retard...what did I tell you about leaving your shit laying around? Gimme that. It's going in the trash!"_

_"No! NO! I picked my toys up! I checked four times! I picked them all up!"_

_"You left a Lego under the couch."_

_"No, it isn’t mine. I picked everything up! I checked four times!"_

_"Too bad!"_

Shaun ripped the pillowcase free of his dad's grasp-- no, his backpack out of his locker-- and dumped its contents at his feet. Everything spilled onto the living room floor-- no, the locker room floor. He threw the pillowcase-backpack down in a whirlwind where past and present crossed.

_"You're mean!"_

_A fist to the jaw knocked him sideways against the wall. Everything went blurry white and his dad’s voice roared, "Stop crying! I'm mean because you make me have to be mean!"_

_"Those are mine!" Shaun wiped blood off his lips_.

_"They were. Now, it's all trash."_

_"I am a surgeon!"_

_"You were. Now, you're fired."_

Shaun crouched, chased by the fear of his father sweeping up the wreck of his present life and tossing it in the dumpster. That always happened no matter how careful he was to keep his belongings contained and hidden.

Orange caught his eye. His plastic scalpel. The item he held when Steve called him smart. A link to life after his abusive father, a steadfast companion through his foster care journey and the sole lifeline for all his nice memories.

He blinked through stinging tears and snatched up the scalpel. Its rough plastic handle armored his hands while he rubbed his thumb up and down the smooth blade. The toy scalpel absorbed all the bad things to make room for good things.

It was Steve's smile. Steve's hand tousling his hair. Steve, Steve, Steve...

Pain welled anew in Shaun's throat. He rose slowly to his feet, his breath louder than his tattered thoughts. Desperation for solace drove him to dig the blade against the pad of his thumb. Everything stayed bearable because a piece of orange and gray plastic centered his world.

And then it snapped. The blade hit the floor like Steve when he fell off the train.

Shaun's heart skipped a beat. Everything's weight pushed him back against the windowed wall behind him. Denser knots filled his stomach. Layer upon torrid layer, deeper and deeper.

Dying supergiant stars forged heavier and heavier elements in their cores until they created iron. Iron, the element in blood, absorbed more energy than it radiated. Gravity took over, collapsing the star into a supernova blast. The star's mass determined whether a neutron star or black hole remained.

And Shaun sensed the inward pull of iron somewhere underneath his heart. He slid to the floor, crushing his thumb against the blade's ragged remains in a valiant, yet fruitless attempt to stop the inward fall. Its roughness became his wretched wreck of a life, a life where everything that mattered got ripped from him because he was too noticeably different.

_“Doctors say he’s never gonna talk or live by himself. For Christ’s sake, he’s still wearing diapers and he’s eight! The ABA bullshit was worthless. Look at him! We never should’ve had him. He’s not worth all this trouble. All he does is stare at the wallpaper like a dunce. He doesn’t understand a word I’m saying.”_

_The wallpaper was interesting to look at! Shaun's eyes followed the dancing filigree design of yellow flowers growing off green vines. Each vine created pleasing diamond patterns on an off-white background_.

_His mother replied tiredly, "You don't know that. He can read words out loud."_

_"Reading isn't understanding."_

_Reading took the work out of translating words into speech. Shaun didn’t speak spontaneously because it required so much effort, like trying to lift something too heavy. Why bother trying when his attempts were met with derision and mockery?_

_ABA? Applied behavioral analysis, Lovaas style? Utter cruelty. Shaun considered sitting still and touching his nose to earn bits of candy utterly insulting-- he wasn’t a dog in training! So he defied his therapists on purpose until they gave up on him. It took two years_.

_Steve, only six at the time, tore past the table Shaun sat at, snarling, “Shut your mouth! Shaun is smart! I’ll find a way to prove it!”_

_And all through that summer, Steve taught Shaun how to use the toilet, how to tie his shoes, how to brush his own teeth and how to say the names of things he pointed to. He didn’t bribe with candy or toys, he made it fun in ways only another kid could_.

 _Shaun was finally compelled to speak by himself after months of practice using his voice. His first unprompted sentence was telling Steve he loved him, and he never forgot the sunshine smile his words brought forth beneath the coolness of a eucalyptus tree_.

_“I love you, too, Shaun." Steve handed him a green apple and tousled his hair for the first time. "You're worth it.”_

_I love you_ was the last thing Shaun said before the funeral director closed Steve’s casket.

Movement in the periphery yanked him back into the present. Someone stood between the locker rows. He inclined his head.

Claire bore with her an aura of worry. In that moment she was Steve walking into the living room after their father stepped out. He picked up what few items didn't get yanked away and put them back into the pillowcase.

The moving figure became Claire again, setting his backpack aside and seating herself against the wall beside him. Far, though not too far. Glancing his way, but not staring at him.

Shaun loosed a hand from his broken toy scalpel and reached for her. All the pressure on his muscles plummeted inward towards the knot in his stomach. He didn't dare let the shockwave of it scorch Claire, too, so he retracted his arm and squeezed his scalpel again.

"I-I'm sorry," Shaun murmured. "I'm very sorry."

"Shaun?" Claire faced him, her voice a clamor louder than church bells.

Shaun's internal collapse accelerated. He dropped the scalpel between his feet and covered his ears. Rage pushed up, fear shoved in. They collided into a single force like a punch to the stomach and plunged endlessly inward.

He scraped his nails through his hair and rocked back and forth. His hands and body moved steadily faster, trying to outrun the impossible. Tingling numbness limned his extremities. Cold to hot, hot to cold, overpowering, the deafening shriek of oblivion prickling under his skin. Sweat beaded on his face. His mouth went dry, then filled with saliva. His heart galloped and every pulse he had pounded. All his muscles braced for impact. His eyes took in individual particles of dirt on his shoes and broke them into their atoms. Claire's breathing and rustling scrubs were cacophonous. So much information came in. He did not have enough room in his overloaded brain to process it.

_"I! Am! A! Surgeon!"_

_"Those are mine!"_

_"You were--"_

_"They were--"_

_"--now, you're fired."_

_"--now it's all trash."_  

Thoughts condensed to garbled nonsense syllables. Deflagration spun at his flailing heartbeat and swallowed his lungs in silence. Air turned thicker than ash. His vision tunneled and filled with phosphenes. Shrieking tinnitus jangled his ears. Senses jumped to full awareness, no longer able to block the chaotic information surging in.

Claire was still beside him, her gaze directed downward at her knees. She offered respectful privacy without leaving him alone in the room, and he hoped what was about to happen wouldn't change how she viewed him.

Shaun clenched his jaw. He squeezed his fists against his ears. His stomach dropped and itched. Tighter, denser, brighter. He hung upon the event horizon of inevitability, a dark lacuna where information broke apart into chaos. Inward collapse reached infinity and rebounded off itself. Terror deep in his brain screeched that he was about to die, sadness whispered that it was okay if he did, but anger snarled the loudest for survival.

Shaun's whole consciousness blinked like eyes. A gamma ray burst of every emotion he felt in his life erupted through the black hole numbness. He wailed, heaved himself forward and slammed backwards against the wall. The crack of his skull shattered the numb pressure off his torso. Both his fists bludgeoned the sides of his head, an automatic movement like breathing. Pain told him he existed. He _had_ to hit himself before his father did. He _had_ to scream before he got screamed at. He _had_ to...

He rocked back and forth, caught between beating his head against the wall and pounding it with his knuckles. His legs uncurled and his heels bashed the nearby locker, each impact louder than gunshots. Every violent movement oriented him to time and space. Being still was death. Moving kept his body feeling, and feeling made him alive.

Hurricane breaths tangled in the lava spit flying from his mouth and drowned in the blizzard of his keening voice. Lightning charged his limbs and his tears formed endless tsunamis. Earthquakes rattled his skeleton and wildfires cremated his muscles. His sense of self exploded, shattered and dissolved, but he was still swirling in the frothy white accretion disk.

A final backwards slam broke him free. It was a release, a relief, a reboot. The black hole couldn't reach him anymore.

He hugged his knees tight and bawled helplessly. His fatigued muscles burned and his head and hands throbbed. Shame didn’t let him glance Claire’s way. He hid his face in his knees, certain he just lost his colleague's respect.

“I'm sorry!” Shaun sobbed. He squinted up at the dim lights on the ceiling, his flushed face shiny with sweat, spit, snot and tears. "I'm sorry! I'm very sorry!"

“Shhh, it’s okay. Shaun, it's okay.” Claire passed him his towel. She moved slow and careful, not getting too close, but not moving away, either.

Shaun draped the towel on his knees and pressed his wet visage into its kind softness, no longer caring that it stank of old sweat. It did little to muffle his uncontrollable bawling.

Claire's presence remained quiet and unobtrusive, like she understood what to do. Maybe she had an autistic relative-- or knew someone who wasn't neurotypical. People who didn't 'get it' got overbearing during meltdowns, making them worse.

But not Claire. She was just there, patient and gentle.

Shaun trusted his ongoing explosion to stay contained within himself. He extended a shaking hand towards her. His fingertips encountered her smooth forearm. She scooted closer to him. Her warm palm found his. Their fingers interlocked.

She didn't talk. She didn't push him to calm down faster. She held his hand and _accepted_.

Emotional reciprocity wasn't something Shaun experienced often around neurotypicals. He sponged up their capricious feelings every day, and it seemed they rarely looked beyond his surface to see what churned beneath. They saw his stoic mask and didn't consider he wore it for _their_ comfort.

But the mask had slipped right before Claire's eyes, and she still held his hand. She wasn't pitying him. Her demeanor indicated she wondered _what happened to him_ rather than _what was wrong with him_.

Shaun's chest ached in a new way-- like giddy sugar-coating poured over his heart. Oxytocin, what an awesome chemical. He reached up and tousled his damp, sweaty hair. This lightheaded feeling usually came on while he performed life saving surgery, or whenever he read through medical journals and learned something new. Like the day he discovered eye contact avoidance was suspected to occur because the subcortical system in autistic brains-- the superior colliculus, the pulvinar nucleus of the thalamus and the amygdala-- became hyperactivated when looking into another's eyes. Eyes broadcast too much emotion. The discomfort, the _naked feeling_ of staring at somebody else's eyeballs wasn't just behavioral, it had a _physical reason_. A physical reason meant he wasn't being difficult on purpose, something he got accused of for most of his life.

Shaun pulled his mind off its tangent to reacquaint himself with the present moment. He grasped Claire's hand a little tighter, his emaciated soul starving for the kindness she so freely offered.

She wasn't here on anyone's orders. She wasn't here because she wanted something from him and needed him to behave properly first. She wasn't here to make demands without regard to his ability to meet them in the moment.

She was here because she wanted to be.

Because she cared about _him_.

Shaun leaned sideways until his head settled on Claire's shoulder. Claire maintained her hold on his hand when she wrapped her arm around his shoulders in a one-armed embrace that wasn't constricting. Something on her skin or hair was cinnamon-scented. The smell of acceptance and understanding.

"Do you want-- no, wait..." Claire clicked her tongue as if reminding herself of something and reworded her statement. "I'll listen if you want to talk about it."

The sweet ache in Shaun's chest swelled towards his throat like soothing balm because _she cared_.

"Doctor Han fired me." He murmured past quivering lips. Tears skittered anew down his cheeks. “I told him I-- am a surgeon. Doctor Lever is nice to work with, but I'm-- not a pathologist. I am a surgeon. Doctor Han-- said I was immature and said I bullied him when I stood up for myself. He was...patronizing me. I'm not stupid-- I know when I am being talked down to. I got-- so angry that I had a meltdown in his office. Doctor Han caused me to make mistakes on purpose. He fired me because he doesn't believe in me. He isn't being fair!”

Claire gasped. She squeezed his hand and his shoulder. "Oh, Shaun. No, he can’t do th--“

“He did.”

Her grip relaxed without letting go. “I’m sorry.”

The statement bounced off Shaun's skull, half-processed.

“Why? You didn’t fire me.”

“No, I meant...” Claire gave a small shake of her head. “...Never mind. I saw how he talked to you. You have every right to be upset. You're a great surgeon, and he won't see that.”

Validation. Someone sympathizing with how he felt instead of telling him to get over it. A rarity.

Shaun's tears slowed as the internal shrapnel from his meltdown reconstituted. The oxytocin dump was slowing, too. He wiped his eyes with the towel and sniffled, emotionally spent.

Somewhere outside, a car horn honked. Rain pattered a symphonic susurrus against the window. Claire breathed life into the room and her scrubs rustled. Everything was loud, but not obtrusively so.

Shaun stimmed by squinting his eyes until his eyelashes turned the overhead lights into long, blurry streaks wavering behind his tear film. An effect similar to peering through a marble held close to his eye.

"I always want water after I cry." Claire gave his hand a reassuring squeeze.

Shaun opened his eyes properly. He sighed, his first proper deep breath since his meltdown started, and realized the dryness of his mouth.

"Water sounds good. I'll have some."

They had to separate first. Shaun reluctantly released her hand. For a moment, he gazed at his palm where her warmth remained. She cast him a glance and stepped between the nearest row of lockers.

He used the moments she was gone to finish shoving his crumpled belongings into his backpack. His shaking hands fumbled on the zipper, but a strong tug successfully closed it.  

The disembodied blade of his plastic scalpel was as gray as Steve's face when he died. Shaun scooped the handle and blade up and tenderly cradled them like a wounded entity able to experience pain. The blade, along with its orange handle, went gently into his right hip pocket with his keys.

Shaun ran a cautious hand over his head and found a nasty bump where he banged it on the wall. That explained the pulsing hot feeling on his scalp. Bodily pain was a strange thing for him, it had a tendency to grow less salient in his awareness the longer it went on without changing. He almost died of appendicitis when he was ten because the ache in his right side faded to a background annoyance. Then it burst, turned his insides into fiery napalm and he screamed inconsolably until he passed out. He woke up three days later in a hospital. Steve told him all about what he missed while he was unconscious.

Claire's shoes padded closer on the cement floor. Shaun clasped his hands against his stomach and faced her. She brought a small paper cup of water, a handful of wet paper towels and an ice pack she must have nicked along the way.

"Here."

Shaun dipped his head gratefully and gulped the chilled water to relieve his dry, sore throat. He pressed the first cold paper towel to his tear-swollen eyes. Soothing coolness overpowered the paper's normally intolerable scratchiness and seeped into his eyelids. He relished the sensation before wiping away the crusty evidence of his tears. The second paper towel mopped up the mess under his nose, and the third took care of the sweat.  

Finally, he used the paper towels as barriers for the ice pack he held against the back of his head. He flinched at the sting, but the cold quickly tamed it.

"I hope that helps," Claire said.

Shaun glanced her way, avoiding the emotional pool of her eyes.

 _There is a lot I wish I could say, Claire. You are one of the nicest people I met. I'm glad you came in here to check on me. I'm glad you still care after seeing what happens when I have a meltdown. Most people look at me different after I have one, but I can feel that you don't. I feel so many things. Sometimes it's confusing. People are confusing. I like you because you aren't as confusing_.

The complex Sistine Chapel artwork of his mind lost most of its info on its journey to his mouth, and the words he spoke were a crayon stick figure barely containing the emotional meaning he ached to convey.

"It feels good. Thank you. You are a good friend."

"You, too." Claire smiled halfway. Not a pitying smile, but the smile of a person who opened her heart to everyone.

Shaun unconsciously mirrored it and turned his gaze to the floor. She remained in his peripheral vision, her blue scrubs lit gently by the dim overhead lights.

"Claire," He licked his lips, his nerves ramping up and bracing themselves for a lot of input. "Is it okay if I hug you?"

Her whole face changed. Softened. Sweetened. He took it as a nonverbal cue to set the ice pack on the floor and awkwardly spread his arms for her. She slipped her arms firmly around his middle instead of over his shoulders.

Shaun carefully encircled Claire's shoulders and resisted the urge to crush her against him. Most neurotypicals found that as uncomfortable as light hugs were to him.

The sugary sweet feeling bloomed in his chest again. She understood him. Maybe not all of him, but enough that he noticed. Enough that it mattered.

He let his cheek touch her hair and closed his eyes when they watered anew. The nice cinnamon smell came from her hair. She was so small and soft.

"You give good hugs," Shaun murmured.

Claire rested her chin against his shoulder. "Thanks. So do you."

"Thanks. So do you." He recognized the echolalia after he repeated her words back to her. She didn't appear to mind.

Their heartbeats synced. Shaun wondered if she noticed, but didn't dare break the moment with silly words. Sometimes, the mere presence of people he liked fulfilled him more than socializing with them. Being in the presence of somebody who got on his level and tried to speak to the way his mind worked was exceedingly rare, so he cherished this. He tucked it into his memory alongside the cinnamon warmth.

Claire's phone buzzed. She loosed one hand to take it out and check it.

"Young adult female. Unknown abdominal pain. Either it's a hot appy or an angry gallbladder."

"Do you have to go?" Shaun asked. He automatically let go of her, anticipating the affirmative.

"Yup. Duty calls." Claire stepped back and smiled wryly. "Never a dull moment."

One of those weird idioms. Nothing was boring. Shaun opened his mouth to toss an equally goofy idiom right back, but changed his mind at the last second.

He furrowed his brow. "Please don't tell anybody that I had a meltdown. It's embarrassing."

"Don't worry, I won't." Claire turned and headed for the door, her cinnamon scent retreating with her. She glanced over her shoulder as she grasped the handle. "Take care, Shaun."

Shaun bowed his head in a nod without meeting her eyes. The door squeaked open and whumped shut. No security guards stood outside. Maybe their shift ended.

He paced around the locker room, icing the back of his head for the required fifteen minutes to lessen the swelling. Heavy rain beat on the window for half that time. It was probably cold outside, so he fished out the black hoodie he hadn't taken from his locker yet and wriggled it on. A pass of his hand smoothed his rumpled hair into an illusion of neatness.

Nobody Shaun knew was in the hall when he exited the locker room. The backpack he carried, its contents evidence of his failure, weighed more on his soul than usual. He sucked in a breath and strode into the bright, open corridor towards the elevator.

His stomach lurched when the light dinged. Nobody in the elevator. He relaxed, got in and punched the first floor button. Another lurch at reaching the first floor. Once more, no one waited to get on. Good, he didn't want to face any other person.

Shaun strolled with purpose into the empty lobby. Something on the wall by the elevator caught his eye. He stopped to glower at the Autism Speaks poster with its blue jigsaw puzzle piece logo.

 _Autism Speaks. It's time to listen_. Shaun heard the words in Doctor Han's voice.

The charity was familiar to Shaun. Familiar because it contributed so much to the stigma autistic people faced, and gave platform to a parent who expressed a desire to drive off a bridge with her autistic daughter. Autism Speaks used fear and exploitation to get donations. Autism Speaks treated autistic people the way Doctor Han treated him.

They were disgusting.

Shaun glanced around, tugged the poster off the wall in one smooth movement and crumpled it into a ball. He dropped it in the trash can in the middle of the lobby, sniffled derisively and walked outside into the cool rain. Petrichor wafted against his face, revitalizing his sinking spirits.

 _I'll prove Doctor Han wrong somehow_ , Shaun thought as he glanced back at the enormous Saint Bonaventure hospital building. He turned away and ventured into the night. _I am a surgeon, and an arrogant man who doesn't know me has no right to tell me I am not_.

A nearly-empty bus pulled up to the bus stop at the same time he arrived, so he hopped on, paid the fare and took the seat immediately behind the doors. The bus lurched into motion. Droplets on the windows broke the city lights into multicolored constellations ripe with purpose.

The driver opened his thermos and sipped. Sharp cinnamon danced filigree patterns of caring throughout the bus. Its redolent sweetness wrapped around Shaun's heart. Claire’s kindness saved him from a spiral of self-loathing. Tomorrow was wrapped in countless unknowns, but, for now, he would be okay.

 _I am a surgeon_. Shaun assured himself.

He bowed his head and relished the cinnamon latibule while the bus rumbled down the street.


End file.
